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People in Missouri reported experiencing a similar problem in July 2023, when the Missouri Highway Patrol imported Another Amber Alert with a link to X’s post. Locals also talked about how they couldn’t see the alert unless they got on the platform. “It was a big change” in how warnings work, said Missouri Highway Patrol Officer Eric Brown, who works in the department’s public awareness and education department.
But the incident did not prompt the Missouri Highway Patrol to drop the X as its way of transmitting Amber Alerts. According to Mr. Brown, after X verified the law enforcement agency’s account as a legitimate government agency, the login problem went away and people “were able to access our records again.”
Several California Highway Patrol X accounts have the same verification badge as the Missouri Highway Patrol, including who dedicated mainly to the dissemination of information on national developments. However, not all of the California corporation’s accounts appear to be reliable, including which is visible the official route of the CHP’s Southern Division, which includes the Los Angeles area.
When it was known as Twitter, X was most viewed as an important part of global ecology and emergency communication. Government officials and organizations around the world have relied on the service as a way to broadcast news about hurricanes, mass shootings, and other crises. Before Musk takes over the platform in 2022, anyone can see tweets from their group without opening the site regardless of whether they have an account on the site or have installed the Twitter mobile app. (In 2015, the company report (that more than 500 million people visit Twitter every month without logging in.)
In June 2023, it is said that X had started to close the content behind the login screen began to appear on the Internet. At that time, Musk to be invited to move the “temporary emergency procedure” that was put in place because X “was getting too much data and degrading the service.” It is not clear what Musk was saying, but that same month he he expressed his concern AI companies like OpenAI are said to be crawling Twitter posts without prior permission.
Now it seems like an idea to turn X into a more closed platform. According to tests conducted this week, X has continued to limit what people without accounts can see. WIRED looked at several of X’s logged-in journalists’ accounts, for example, and only saw samples of their popular posts rather than chronologically. It appears that accounts managed by government agencies are not limited in this way; All information shared with the California Highway Patrol information account can be viewed without logging in.
Aside from allowing anyone to see content shared on the platform, another way Twitter helped emergency speakers was by giving them access to its API, which Musk later removed. That authorized agencies such as the US National Tsunami Warning Center to send automatic notifications of potentially fatal natural disasters. Investigators and first responders can also use the API to monitor activity on Twitter and “pull out key information, such as identifying areas of vulnerability or countering disinformation,” Hughes says. “The role of this platform has changed as policy and public use change, so its functionality today looks very different.”
Despite these challenges, X remains an important platform for transmitting information during emergencies. In October, several government officials suddenly announced he told PRWeek he planned to continue posting updates on X even though it had slowed down as he gained more followers on the site, and the most important thing was to ensure that the correct information reached as many people as possible. But what happened in California this week shows how government agencies can run into trouble when third-party services they consider trustworthy later change their policies in unexpected ways.
